that! Tell them you would marry me if I had to go to prison tomorrow!”
The brown curls moved slowly from side to side.
“What! There is truth then in what they say?”
“Forgive me—forgive me!” were Claire’s only words.
“So it is true!”
His tone would have been a marvel of restraint in any man; in this one it was a miracle. Still on his knees he besought her, as a last favour, to tell him whom she did love. Her eye flew to Tom’s: the cunning of the criminal lunatic shone through the tears in his. “So it is Erichsen—not Blaydes,” he said, getting up and standing harmlessly in their midst; next instant he had whipped out his pistol and fired it point-blank at Tom’s heart. The report was appalling; a white cloud filled the room; as it thinned away, there was Tom still standing, with the one calm face present. The charge had contained no ball. Next instant the pistol itself was hurled at his head, and Daintree was upon Tom with tooth and nail—cursing, raving, moaning—fighting Tom and Nicholas Harding both—fighting the constables and waiters who poured in like water—and still wailing, raving, cursing as he fought.
It was a horrible sound—human no longer—though the fist of the sportsman still flew hard and true from the shoulder—though the tears of the lover were still wet upon the madman’s face. It was, nevertheless, but the husk of a man that was at last overpowered and carried to a distant bedroom. That complex heart still squirted liquid fire through every vein; but the brain was not; inherent mania had claimed its own.
